March 11, 2008

This is a dumb line in the sand. The Dallas Morning News has one of the best sports sections in the country. If it wants a blogger to be one of the five journalists covering the games, and Cuban is telling the truth that he's not mad at that blogger, he should let the guy in the locker room. All bloggers are not the same. The guy who edits Deadspin is a professional reporter whose credentials request is safer to grant than some random fan in Dallas whose mom is his only reader. Cuban's ego is wild. He loves to tell other people how they should be running their businesses, regardless of whether he has any expertise in the field. Like this: "If he is correct and blogging is part of the base job of being a beat reporter, thats a sad commentary on beat reporters. They get 500 words in a story about a game or event, if readers are lucky. If there is excess time, I would imagine that time could be spent offering indepth analysis and access rather than throwing up hundred word commentary on a blog. If there isn't space in the paper, then in depth analysis that takes advantage of the minimal marginal cost of publishing feature stories, IMHO, would be a far better use of a beatwriters time and serve as a far stronger differentiation that would attract readers." I know Cuban loves the sports page, so I guess this rant is reflective of that, but he's not running a daily newspaper so he doesn't know the financial and editorial motivations for turning reporters into bloggers. It's like me telling him how to structure an IPO.

Yeah, love him or hate him, you can aways expect Cuban to get into this kind of mild controversy. I must say, I can understand his egalitarian view of "blogger" status. Sure, there are some incredibly competent and professional bloggers. That's not his point. A blogger is a blogger is a blogger. Those Morning News staffers in the dressing room are there as print media. He doesn't say that they can't blog as part of their assigned duties, although he does disagree with this trend or business practice (as he likes to do, voicing purely his own personal/professional opinion). What he doesn't like is accrediting a Morning News staffer solely to blog (thus having preferential treatment over other would-be locker room bloggers). That would mean he'd have to give other bloggers the same access. And that would be opening a can of worms that he's not prepared to do at the moment (due to space, security, or whatever constraints). I'll have to do some searching, but this isn't the first (or likely last) time that bloggers in the pro sport dressing rooms has been made an issue.

Cuban woke up this morning and pouted because he wasn't he center of attention, what with the controversy over the Jason Kidd trade starting to fade and all. What better way to inject himself into the limelight than to come up with yet another publicity stunt disguised as Super Mark sticking to his principles? When you throw in the "what is a blogger?" angle, it's almost bulletproof since he can weasel-word for quite a while without providing positive proof that he's still just the asshole he's always been. Cuban has made me schizo. I want the Mavs to win, but I'll root for them to lose as long as he's the owner.